Tag: MOOCs

The world of higher education always looks to study trends and data in online learning. Grade Level: Tracking Online Education in the United States by I. Elaine Allen and Jeff Seaman is an annual report published by Babson Survey Research Group.…

This infographic from TopCollegesOnline.org outlines the plusses and minuses of MOOCs, and highlights a surprising statistic about student success rates with MOOCs: According to this infographic, a whopping 93% of MOOC students fail their course!

How can you teach a course to 40,000 faceless students and still maintain some semblance of a teacher-student connection?

This was the challenge that Professor Mitchell Duneier of Princeton University faced last year when he offered an online course in introductory sociology. The non-credit course was offered free of charge through Coursera, and had an enrollment of 40,000 students from 113 different countries.

While MOOC enrollment can sometimes reach over 100,000 students, academics are beginning to wonder about how effective they are in providing a quality education. How successful are MOOCs in helping students acquire, retain, and apply freshly-learned knowledge?

In a recent OpEd article on Newsday.com, Marian Stoltz-Loike, vice president of online education for Touro College, wonders if MOOCs can truly be considered “education” or if perhaps they would be better described as “a new form of entertainment.”

While MOOCs seem to be the latest and greatest phenomenon to enter the world of online education, Ry Rivard suggests that MOOCs are merely going through a “Hype Cycle,” and predicts that “the mania over massive open online courses may…

Dr. Michael F. Schatz, professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has recently developed an innovative MOOC that uses technology to help students understand physics concepts as they apply to their everyday surroundings.

Featured Posts

What do online courses offer in the way of preparing students for the Real World? What life skills could students gain by taking online courses? Here are 6 great examples of skills that students can learn in an online classroom environment.